Methodology

This page explains how the numbers on this site are produced, so you can judge them rather than take them on faith.

Time zone overlap

Overlap is the number of hours per day that two working days occur at the same real moment. We compute it by converting both working windows to UTC and measuring the intersection.

Because a working day recurs daily, we compare across a one-day span in each direction. This matters for distant pairs: a team in Los Angeles and a team in Sydney do not overlap on the same calendar date, but they do overlap every day in practice, and treating them as having zero shared hours would be wrong.

The default assumption

Where an employer does not state its hours, we assume a 9:00am–5:00pm working day in the team's own zone. This assumption is stated wherever it is used. When an employer does state its hours or required overlap, we use what they said.

Worked examples

An Eastern-time team and a Pacific-time worker share five hours: the worker's 6am–2pm covers the team's 9am–5pm. That is why Pacific-based staff on East Coast teams start early — the arithmetic, not company culture, produces that day.

What the verdicts mean

The labels on each listing are editorial judgments about what a given number of shared hours makes possible. They are not facts about the job:

• Full overlap — 7 hours or more. Meetings can go anywhere in the day.
• Strong overlap — 4 to 7 hours. Enough for daily standups and real-time work.
• Partial overlap — 2 to 4 hours. Workable, but meetings crowd into a narrow block.
• Edge overlap — under 2 hours. Expect early starts or late finishes.
• No overlap — none. The role only works fully asynchronously.

The four-hour threshold is the widely cited floor for a team that still holds live meetings. Below two hours, only handoffs are realistic.

Daylight saving

All offsets are standard time. Most US states move an hour between March and November; Arizona and Hawaii do not. During those months, overlap with a zone on a different daylight saving schedule shifts by an hour. We disclose this rather than simulate it, because the underlying job data rarely states a precise zone to begin with, and simulating a shift would imply a precision the source never had.

States spanning more than one time zone are marked, and we show the zone where most of the state's population and employers sit.

Job listings

Listings come from Himalayas and are shown with the attribution their terms require. We apply three rules:

• A job appears on a state page only when the employer says it can hire there — either stating it hires anywhere in the US, or naming that state. A listing that says nothing about eligibility is not assumed to be open everywhere.
• A working zone is only shown when the source states or clearly implies one, and we label whether it was stated by the employer or inferred from the location. We do not invent an offset to fill a gap.
• Expired listings are removed. Every job carries an expiry date, and listings past it are dropped from the site at the next build.

Job descriptions are the employer's own text. We strip scripts, tracking and styling from them for safety, but we do not rewrite them.

State tax and reference data

Income tax treatment, convenience-of-the-employer rules and time zones are compiled from each state's department of revenue and official state sources, cited on the page where they appear.

We describe rates qualitatively — "among the highest", "above a threshold" — rather than printing specific percentages. Rates change with each legislative session, and a stale tax rate presented as current is worse than no number at all. For a figure you intend to act on, use the linked primary source.

What we do not do

• We do not submit applications or make hiring decisions. Applications are completed on the employer's or job board's site.
• We do not accept payment from employers to feature or rank a listing.
• We do not publish a state page with our own analysis until that analysis is written.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, we want to know. See theeditorial policy for how corrections are handled.